Shouzer

Thursday morning was my last final. I finished up with it around 11am, and went directly to work on ChallengeX. Around 3:30am Thursday night, we took the ‘Nox out for the first road test ever. I was riding shotgun as we drove down Wabash Ave (45 mph speed limit) at 72mph with no headlights. The car performed amazingly, especially in high speed charging mode, in which we drive >40mph and charge the 360V battery at the same time. The car drags a little between 0-50, but it hauls from 50-70. We lost the vehicle tailing us when we did the 50-70 test that night. Afterwards, we went for the mandatory celebratory trip to IHOP. I got home that morning around 6am, took a shower and a 1.5hour nap. Then, we reconvened to prep the ‘Nox for shipping. That’s right, we did our first road test 7 hours before shipping it. Not something I would highly recommend btw. I would have liked to have had more time for testing, but this makes for a totally cool story.

While I’m talking about ChallengeX, I have to tell you about this guy on the team named Tom. Tom is 2nd in command of the Fab team, which means he puts all of the mechanical stuff in the car, and he was instrumental in the design/building of our custom transmission. Anyway, Tom pulled an all-nighter Wednesday night fabbing up a new driveshaft. (We sheared the bolts on our previous one). He showed up 45 minutes late to his 8am final, and then left about an hour later. Edit: I was also in this final, and it took me around 3 hours. He told me later that he only needed to get a 55% on it so he wasn’t trying hard. End Edit Then, he proceeded to return to work on ChallengeX. Around 11-12 that night, he got bored because we were doing some electrical/controls testing. So he decided to build a little 5hp moped. It took him like 30 minutes. The guy is insane. He ended up staying up for like 50 hours straight, working on ChallengeX almost the whole time.

Today, I moved into my new place in the Haute. That went pretty smoothly actually. On Tuesday, we’re flying our to Phoenix for the big testing competition. I’m really looking forward to it now that our car is fully functional. I was starting to dread it up to that night because I didn’t think we would finish. I believe I’ll have internet access there so I’ll try to post updates.

In other news, I had yet another hard drive replacement yesterday. Hooray Compaq! Actually, the hard drives are Hitachi so Hooray Hitachi!

I’ve got two interviews tomorrow with Google. It should be a good experience, but I’m definitely starting to get nervous about them. I’ve never actually had a real interview. On top of that, from what I’ve read, Google’s interviews are pretty tough. Oh well, it’s cool they’re even letting me interview with them.

THANK GOODNESS IT’S SPRING BREAK!!!

I’ve been on break now since last Friday at 3 p.m. after my final midterm. Needless to say it’s been amazing! I was able to sleep in, not have to get up at any certain time, and, best of all, I haven’t had to go to class!!!

Monday was great, as I spent time with my sister and nephew. He’s gotten so big. He’s only 3 months old and already weighs 20 pounds…and he’s wearing clothes for 9-12 month olds. He is so cute though!!!! And he’s a really good baby….he’s just ALWAYS hungry! Didn’t really do anything Tuesday, just relaxed and did some stuff around the house…same on Wednesday as well.

Yesterday I came back to STL for a conference…it was on various topics ranging from Trauma Case Studies by the chief trauma surgeon at SLU, to toxicology of various party/date rape drugs, and my personal favorite, forensic death investigation by the chief medical officer of St. Louis (also a SLU doc)

After the conference I drove up to Chicagoland, which is where I am now. Spendin’ some time with the boy while I can. He’s tryin’ to get my to buy a 360 so he can kick my ass in COD2 from 300 miles away….LOL.

Other than that not a whole lot has been happening….same ‘ol stuff….class, study, and work. 

Work has been exciting lately. With the weather turning nicer, more people have been getting out.  And when some people get out, things tend to go crashing….and then we get a trauma.  Exciting for us, bad for the patient.  For instance, last weekend, Level 1 trauma, guy crashed his car into a tree.  He was a freakin’ mess…got the whole works: 3 IVs, labs, xray, CT scans, 4 units of blood, and a chest tube all before goin’ up to the ICU.

Once we got him up to the ICU, he started crashing…he ended up getting a lot more blood and two more chest tubes.  He coded and they called it.  They shut everything off, took him off the monitor and vent…then he started spontaneously breathing on his own.  So they had to put him back on and everything and resume working on him.  I think they finally stabilized him….after 3 hours.

I’m taking this weekend off from work since I’m up here visiting Scott.  We’re just gonna be hanging out and relaxing…he’ll probably kick my ass in Call of Duty 2 some more….he likes to do that…LOL.

In other news, I have to have surgery sometime this summer.  It’s nothing major, I’ve actually had this particular operation three times before.  It’s an operation on my left ear, to replace the implant that serves to connect my incus bone to the cochlea. More than likely, the implant in my ear has either been displaced or simply stopped working, which has effectively made me deaf in my left ear. After my last hearing examination, my hearing was less than 50 percent…so apparently i only use my right ear to hear stuff.  Prolly why Ii’m constantly asking people to repeat stuff.

Well, that’s pretty much all that’s new with me….time for lunch!

 

Today was huge for me.  First, I finished class for the quarter.  That’s right, no more boring lectures for 2 weeks.

More importantly though, was the ChallengeX breakthrough.  We finally got the 2 electric motors spinning the rear wheels under the full control of our hybrid vehicle controller.  Basically, we have a huge state machine that controls our vehicle.  It is my job to make sure that controller talks to everything else.  We have had communication with the 2 motors for about a month now, but today was the first time we implemented the controller itself.  We had to build a bunch of circuits to handle the pedals and other driver inputs, and then establish communication with those.  Then, it was finally time to put the power to the wheels.  It was absolutely amazing to realize something I have been working towards all year.

I’m working at the office this week and next, but I’m home for lunch right now. I forgot how much I hated getting up at 7:30 every morning to head into work. And, maybe even more, I forgot how much I hated going to bed at a decent time. I’m going to have to make my first billion quick so I don’t have to do this stuff much longer. When I get home I’ll post an update of the last few days.

I got a job offer today from General Motors! As you can tell from the exclamation point, I’m pretty stoked. It’s in Warren, MI which is near Detroit, so I guess I’ll be spending my summer up there.

I’m going to be setting up real-time, hydraulically-actuated vehicle laboratory tests for structural evaluation. I’m not quite sure what that means yet, but I’m excited about it.

Oh thank god!!!

This week has been pretty stressful, which has attributed to my lack of posts, but thankfully, the weekend is finally here and I’m actually smilin’.

So the week started out bad because we were supposed to get our first molecular biology exam back on Monday. They weren’t graded, so he said we’d get them back on Wednesday. I was also informed on Monday, we’d have our second Immunology exam on Friday. That put me in a bad mood right away because Mal, Ketta, and I were all planning on going to Wild Country on Thursday for the first time in, like, four weeks. So needless to say, that ticked me off.

To top it off…we didn’t get our study guides for this Immunology test–which, by the way, the prof said would be A LOT harder than the first one–until Wednesday…2 days before the exam, that covered 6 chapters. Now, 6 chapters may not seem like a lot…but you haven’t seen my Immunology book and just the sheer amount of details we have to learn is so immense.

Finally, we get to today…the day of my Immunology exam. It was pretty tough…a lot harder for me than the first exam. So I was a little worried about that. But I talked with some classmates afterwards, and they all felt similar about it, so that made me feel better.

Then today, we finally got our exams back in molecular biology. The average on the exam was a 63.5, the highest was a 97.5 and the median was 65.5, I believe. Needless to say, this teacher curved the exam. In fact, his grading scale has a curve built into it. Must be why I love that professor! Basically you can get 30 points out of 100 and get a C on the exam. 50 points is a B and 70 points is an A.

Well, unfortunately, I didn’t get an A…but I did get a B, which was a hell of a lot better than how I thought I’d done. I basically left that test thinking I’d be lucky to get 10 points or something crazy like that. So, thank god for his curve and for the partial credit. IT SAVED MY LIFE!

Anyways, gotta work this weekend, per usual. 1030 a.m. – 11:30 p.m. Those shifts are actually startin’ to suck because I’m not gettin’ home until midnight on Sundays and I usually still have some homework to do, which makes me dead tired on Mondays during my 8 a.m. class.

Well, now I think I’m gonna lay down and take a nap, wait for Mal and Ketta to get home and then hopefully go to happy hour…

Have a great weekend everybody!!!

I just got back from Detroit last night. I had to go up there for a ChallengeX conference/workshop. We saw some cool GM stuff when we were up there like the learning center, where they take apart competitors’ cars to see how they work, the assembly plant for the Pontiac G6, and the Heritage Center, which is basically a GM museum. They have all kinds of old cars there, mostly ones they consider to be special. They had old concept cars, some really nice Corvettes, Indy and Nascar cars, old Caddies, and even a few jet powered cars.

I can’t really say too much about the conference. They went over the rules for the June competition and had some various technical sessions to help us out. Most of the comments I have about it are not appropriate for this setting.

It was fun, but it was exhausting too. Last week would have probably been my busiest week of the quarter, and I jammed it into 2.5 days. Phew, I’m glad it’s over. I had 3 tests, a 5 page paper, 2 prelabs, and my regular homework, including an unusually long Signals set. I was incredibly stressed out last week, so that’s why I didn’t post much. I’m really glad it’s over now. I’m gonna take today off and watch football. The Rams are actually on this week!

Thank goodness it’s Friday!

That’s really all I have to say. It’s a shame the new version of the site can’t support the shout board anymore…oh well. I just felt like I should post something while I sit here in the coffee shop at the Busch Student Center and wait for my MCB (Molecular & Cellular Biology) course to start at 2:10 p.m. It’s so boring, I really don’t know why I still go since I could prolly do just fine without going since he gives us his own notes on what he’s going to lecture about.

But no, I’m going to be a good student and still go to class. Well, we’ll see how long that lasts…LOL!

Anybody have any big plans for the weekend? I am, of course, scheduled to work as always. They’ve had me in the Fast Track a lot recently. It’s run by a physician assistant and a nurse and then me. I don’t get to do much…except escort patients back and forth. The Fast Track is separate from the main ER…it’s in a freakin’ other building. Needless to say, when I work in FT I definitely get my cardio-workout that day with all the walking back and forth I do. I’d say on average, I walk between 3-6 miles per day back and forth when I work over there.

Ok, time to try and be productive and look over my notes before class.

Have a great weekend everyone!

So I was workin’ this weekend–imagaine that, me workin’ on a weekend–and I don’t know if there was a full moon out or what on Saturday, but people were actin’ crazy.

For one, three male patients came in because their girlfriends stabbed them. Two, were pretty superficial requiring only minimal sutures. The third, however was pretty bad.

Anyways, a patient I was helping out with required a foley and yes, yous truly was the lucky guy who got to put it in. The nurse was kinda joking around when she told me be sure to “get a firm grip at the base and show it who’s the boss.”

I couldn’t help but silently chuckle at that. Anyways, I was preparing to begin, I told him that he’d feel a lot of pressure when I inserted the catheter. The patient just looked up at me and said “Lou doesn’t like those.”

At first, I was confused as to why the patient was suddenly talking about himself in the third person. I said, “Excuse me?” The patient repeated, this time with a slight gesture down to where I was about to cause him some great discomfort, “Lou doesn’t like those.”

One of the residents in the room said, “Well Lou’s about to have his mouth full and won’t be able to complain.”

I was amazed the doctor was able to say it with a straight face. I finished up, and the nurse and I both left the room and had a really good laugh over that one!

Needless to say, Lou had his mouth full for the rest of his stay in the ER.

Nick sent me these pics a few weeks ago to put up in my webspace so he could write a post about them. I guess he forgot, even though I reminded him…

I guess it’s some CT scans of a guy w/ a bullet in his head. I only see it in the 1st 2 though. For being a doctors kid, I have surprising little knowledge about this kind of crap.

I’m in Boston now for the conference. The hotel is pretty pimp, although I didn’t end up getting my own room.

Last night, we went out to this semi-fancy seafood place. I had a seafood casserole that had lobster, shrimp, crab, and some sort of fish. We also had raw oysters as an appetizer. I had never had those before. They weren’t bad at all, but I doubt that I would order them again.

Tonight, we’re supposed to go on a sunset cruise around Boston harbor. That should be interesting. I think it would be a little more fun if there were some girls around. I haven’t seen the other teams yet, but since this is an engineering competition….

Tomorrow night, we’re having a lobster/clam bake. I’m looking forward to that one. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I went to Peoria with the rest of the team to give a presentation to Caterpillar. It was pretty scary for me because there were quite a few VIPs there. We got lots of free food though, and I got some overtime hours for the day. Therefore, I would call it a pretty good day.

I found out yesterday that I’m getting my own personal room in the Crown Plaza Hotel when I go to Boston next week. Booyakasha!

I have to give another campus tour today. I didn’t really get a choice on this one, I just got an email last night saying that I have to do it. I don’t mind though.

Oh, and I’m coming home this weekend.

Yeah, it’s been a while since I posted about workin’ in the ER so I thought it was time to do it again. Works out well, too since last week was so crazy what with the heat and all.

So to begin, there were a lot of heat related cases in general. A lot of headaches, exhaustion, dehydration…that sort of thing. Around 5 p.m. or so, this one patient came in by ambulance…WITH A TEMP OF 107.7! (Incidentally, the radio station we had on at the time). It was pretty bad because apparently your brain starts shut down when your temp reaches 105 degrees. So for 3 hours, I was busy with that one patient applying constant convection–procedures to lower body temp (i.e. constantly spraying his body with water, having fans on him, wiping him down, etc. etc.). That was in addition, to the regular stuff I have to do when a “trauma� patient arrives.

Anyways, I need to get back to studyin’ physics. It’s the last week and I can’t give up now, no matter how much I just wanna throw this stupid book away forever. I’ll be coming home a week from Monday, so I hope I can see you guys before we all go back to school for the fall term. Later!

Dr. Chambers, one of the Challenge X advisors, points out the spelling error on the Chevy Equinox we will be working on.

This is my workstation. Those 3 boxes on the shelf are called PXI chassis, they cost between $10,000-$15,000. Their purpose is to run the models for the car and the car’s control system. The simulate them in real time to achieve as accurate real-world conditions. The black box next to my laptop is the driver control system I built. It’s pretty sweet if you ask me, although I didn’t build the box itself, just the circuit inside it.

I had another picture I wanted to show of a nasty blister my roommate got from sunburn, but it came out blurry, so I’ll spare you.

I also have links to some videos I made for a presentation I have to make at Caterpillar on Thursday. The first one is a video of the dashboard simulation. (It’s about 10.8MB). The second one is a video of the driver controls in use. It shows the the process used to achieve the results shown in the first video. (It’s only about 2MB).

In other news, I’m flying to Boston next week for a ChallengeX LabVIEW conference. (Labview is the software I on which I work). It should be pretty sweet. I’m going to eat as much free lobster as I can.